At the beginning of autumn I found myself offered an opportunity. There was a contest offered by the local city council to help start your business. It included classes about writing a business plan, marketing your business and technology available for small businesses. I had dreamed about starting a cupcake business for a while. My big dream was to have a cupcake food truck that would go around three days a week and sell cupcakes. I signed up for the contest and was really excited. For the month of October I was busy drawing up the financials, looking up how to get a food truck and refurbish it, what sort of legal hoops I needed to jump through and how to write a business plan. And it took All. Of. My. Time. Eventually it went from a food truck to just a stand at the farmer's market in the summer. But that meant I would give up every weekend I had off to sell cupcakes and then bake those cupcakes (read hundreds) in my "free" time after work and at the end of a year I'd make around $10,000. I may or may not have had a minor breakdown. And then in all of that Mom said something that freed me. "Who says you have to do it?" I was caught up in not letting anyone down. I feel so guilty if I say I'm going to do something and then don't follow through that I felt locked in to creating this business. There were other people in the contest that had businesses that were their livelihoods or were giving up their day jobs to start a business and here I was still clinging to my day job and thinking of starting this business for what? For fun? I realized that I am not prepared to start baking as a business. I am not an expert at baking and I have never baked more than one set of cupcakes at a time to take in to work. The work it took to do the financials was torture and that's what most of my time would be about. I have so many other things that I love to do or want to learn to do besides my day job and all of the time I have to do them would be lost to making cupcakes. I love baking, but not being forced to make them, lets me do it for fun not for profit.
Around this same time I was writing a lecture for the students in the Medical Laboratory Science program about clinical microbiology. It's what I am (a Medical Laboratory Scientist) and what I do every day (clinical microbiology) and what I've done for 10 years. It was easy to sit down and write about microorganisms and pathogens and all the intricacies in identifying them. And I realized in that I am close to an expert. I have experience and certifications and I really love doing it most days. I've felt restless and unhappy in my job recently but I also realized that I am free after I leave the laboratory. For the most part it doesn't follow me home. I have time to do those other things, like knitting, blogging, photography, gardening, that I would have to give up for making cupcakes. So the job that I thought would free me from my unhappy job would actually shackle me to it. I would have less free time, work more and ultimately be even unhappier. And in that I found more job satisfaction and was more thankful for my day job than I had been in a long time. If I ever did want to try my hand at making cupcakes in the future I at least have more information. Because I wouldn't want to do it poorly. I would want to succeed and right now anything I did would not succeed. I don't have the energy or the will to see it through. So I've found contentedness again in where I am. And I'm thankful for that.
